Thursday, March 24, 2016

The Tree Man

A young ranting man with a long disheveled beard has just spent 24 hours up an 80 foot sequoia tree in Seattle Washington, disrupting traffic and shutting down the streets.  He seems to have thrown at the police and the onlookers , who had gathered to watch him,in turn, fruits, pine cones and tree branches while refusing to listen to officers and other negotiators who were trying to bring him down. At some point,  he even bared his behind, despite the cold , and at another time sat quietly smoking a cigarette and oblivious to all the racket around him.

The public  reaction has mostly been sympathetic , with a twitter account dedicated to the " man in tree", and pictures splashed over the internet of young people holding signs and placards requesting that the man be left alone , and stating that trees are "free" for anyone to climb and sit on .

The New York times is quoting a "morning radio host musing : is there a metaphor in all of this ? , like the rest of us , in our own way, would like to climb a tree and be left alone?"

Maybe not a metaphor, but a symbolic gesture? The world seems to have gone mad, suddenly . Between the terror attacks in Europe, the incessant shouting of politicians, the dirt that is being splashed in all directions, and the obscene amount of money that is being spent during this election season --uselessly, should I add, we all seem to be wanting to go up a tree and find a refuge away from all this madness.

The latest? It seems the sibling relationship is the ideal one to forge a terrorist , or two, or three.
So if the other pre requisites are unemployment and lack of education, that makes a lot of T's in the Middle East.

In the 1930's, while the world was preparing in earnest for the second world war, one of the most important German writers of the 20th century, Robert Walser , a favorite of Kafka and Benjamin, volontarily  commited himself to an asylum in Austria to escape the madness that had taken hold in Europe, presumably to find sanity and categorically refusing to be freed . He remained there until his death in 1956.

Is it time to ask that asylums throughout the world  open their doors for the new refugees?
After all as Kurt Tucholsky once said :" You can't whistle against the ocean".